The Wandering Jew
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saw by looking in his eyesThat they remembered everything;And this was how I came to knowThat he was here, still wandering.For though the figure and the sceneWere never to be reconciled,I knew the man as I had knownHis image when I was a child. With evidence at every turn,I should have held it safe to guessThat all the newness of New YorkHad nothing new in loneliness;Yet here was one who might be Noah,Or Nathan, or Abimelech,Or Lamech, out of ages lost, --Or, more than all, Melchizedek. Assured that he was none of these,I gave them back their names again,To scan once more those endless eyesWhere all my questions ended then.I found in them what they revealedThat I shall not live to forget,And wondered if they found in mineCompassion that I might regret. Pity, I learned, was not the leastOf time's offending benefitsThat had now for so long impugnedThe conservation of his wits:Rather it was that I should yield,Alone, the fealty that presentsThe tribute of a tempered earTo an untempered eloquence. Before I pondered long enoughOn whence he came and who he was,I trembled at his ringing wealthOf manifold anathemas;I wondered, while he seared the world,What new defection ailed the race,And if it mattered how remoteOur fathers were from such a place. Before there was an hour for meTo contemplate with less concernThe crumbling realm awaiting usThan his that was beyond return,A dawning on the dust of yearsHad shaped with an elusive lightMirages of remembered scenesThat were no longer for the sight. For now the gloom that hid the manBecame a daylight on his wrath,And one wherein my fancy viewedNew lions ramping in his path.The old were dead and had no fangs,Wherefore he loved them -- seeing notThey were the same that in their timeHad eaten everything they caught. The world around him was a giftOf anguish to his eyes and ears,And one that he had long reviledAs fit for devils, not for seers.Where, then, was there a place for himThat on this other side of deathSaw nothing good, as he had seenNo good come out of Nazareth? Yet here there was a reticence,And I believe his only one,That hushed him as if he beheldA Presence that would not be gone.In such a silence he confessedHow much there was to be denied;And he would look at me and live,As others might have looked and died. As if at last he knew againThat he had always known, his eyesWere like to those of one who gazedOn those of One who never dies.For such a moment he revealedWhat life has in it to be lost;And I could ask if what I saw,Before me there, was man or ghost. He may have died so many timesThat all there was of him to seeWas pride, that kept itself aliveAs too rebellious to be free;He may have told, when more than onceHumility seemed imminent,How many a lonely time in vainThe Second Coming came and went. Whether he still defies or notThe failure of an angry taskThat relegates him out of timeTo chaos, I can only ask.But as I knew him, so he was;And somewhere among men to-dayThose old, unyielding eyes may flash,And flinch -- and look the other way.
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